Sunday, April 24, 2011

Malicious Credibility

The Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association and the Ukrainian Canadian Congress have led a sanctimonious protest in public, airing their grievance that the Holdomor is not receiving equal, if not superior place of pride front-and-centre at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. They claim that the Holocaust, a historical and precisely-documented event representing the atrocity of institutionalized genocide should be treated as just one of many such events.

They take great umbrage that the museum was originally planned, and continues to be planned, to primarily showcase the Holocaust as representative of the unspeakable tragedy that can befall a specifically-focused-upon ethnic/religious group through systematically de-humanizing them with an organized agenda of slander to justify all human rights denied them, isolating them from the rest of humanity and embarking on a mission of total annihilation.

It does not assuage their grievance to be informed that the Holdomor, and indeed all events of man's inhumanity to man will be present, documented and clearly mourned in the museum. Their resentment and anger is directed at the plans to 'elevate' one nation's tragedy over that of another. Reasoning with them that the Holocaust represents a singular event in the scope and detail of its prosecution makes no inroads with them.

They have taken to inflating the dreadful and deliberate starvation of millions of Ukrainians (1932-33) by the Soviet Union in an effort to 'prove' that it represented a horror whose effect far transcended that of the Holocaust. Their loss was greater than that of European Jewry. Their numbers of dead far outstripped that of the Jews. The assault and trauma left them was more awful and must be acknowledged.

Academics and scholars representing studies in history, sociology, social anthropology, languages, literature, linguistics, communications, education, remembrance and research, history and classics, legal and political philosophy, holocaust studies, comparative politics, contemporary theory, humanities, sociology and social research, study of contemporary antisemitism, European studies, culture studies and academies of sciences, Slavic languages and literatures, from the United States, Britain, Spain, Canada, Israel, France, Ukraine, Germany, Austria, Ireland, Poland, and Russia have become involved to admonish this movement to de-legitimize the purpose of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights.

They correct the figures related to the Ukrainian famine to represent the true numbers, not the inflated numbers put forward by the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association and the Ukrainian Canadian Congress. They point out that some of the hallowed nationalist groups that these two associations defend were Fascists, allied with the Nazis and were themselves responsible for many civilian deaths.

And they conclude their statement of support for the function, purpose and focus of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights by this summation:

"We therefore assert that since the UCCLA and UCC have not understood that confronting the historical record openly and honestly is preferable to manipulative falsehood, have engaged in a competition of suffering, and have failed to acknowledge both the vices and the virtues of the nationalist movement, they ought to stay out of a debate about the Canadian Museum of Human Rights."

This represents a general opinion site for its author. It also offers a space for the author to record her experiences and perceptions,both personal and public. This is rendered obvious by the content contained in the blog, but the space is here inviting me to write. And so I do.